GOP Continues to Blow Off Rule About Not Criticizing the President During Wartime



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/gop-continues-to-blow-off_b_5903104.html

The biggest news of the past 10 days: President Obama launched the first sorties into Syria, targeting ISIS terrorists. Within 24 hours, however, Republicans everywhere decided to turn an awkward salute into a near-impeachable crime against humanity, thus violating one of their most sacred rules from the Bush administration era: never criticize the commander-in-chief during wartime. Here's just another friendly reminder of what I thought was the rule about this kind of behavior (note that O'Reilly and Hannity have been especially critical of Obama):

Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money

By Tim Dickinson | September 24, 2014



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Koch Industries is headquartered in a squat, smoked-glass building that rises above the prairie on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. The building, like the brothers' fiercely private firm, is literally and figuratively a black box. Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America's second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company's stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don't disclose this information."

But Koch Industries is not entirely opaque. The company's troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.

Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch's pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/16/elisabeth-hasselbeck-benghazi-nfl-fox_n_5831230.html

On Tuesday, we got some hard data about just how obsessed Fox News is with Benghazi — not that we needed much proof.

Right on cue, "Fox & Friends" host Elisabeth Hasselbeck threw another log on that fire, drawing Benghazi into the story of the NFL's domestic violence scandal: